Close Your Eyes

by Robotham, Michael

  Tommy is gazing at the mirror. He seems to be studying the detectives. Counting them. Wondering how two became four.

  Cray pinches her eyes with her thumb and forefinger. ‘He denies being at the farmhouse that night. He says you tricked him into saying that.’

  ‘Can I talk to him?’

  ‘That’s not such a good idea.’

  ‘He talked to me once.’

  I follow her along the corridor to the interview room. She knocks twice. The door opens. Tommy looks up, cocking his head to one side, reminding me of a bird in a cage. Cray tells the interview team to take a break and checks her watch before announcing the time, date and names of those present for the recording.

  Taking a seat directly in front of Tommy, I wait until he looks at me … and then longer.

  ‘How are the k-k-kittens?’ he asks.

  ‘They’re good. I’m going to feed the mother later.’

  ‘You have to change her water.’

  ‘I will.’

  My eyes wander over his face. There are tiny black specks in the brown of his irises like ants trapped in honey. ‘When I talked to you at the farmhouse, you told me that you watched Elizabeth and Harper.’

  He shakes his head.

  ‘I’m not judging you, Tommy. We all have secret desires. Sometimes we do things that we know aren’t right. It’s as though we have another voice in our heads. I know you want a girlfriend. Someone to love. Someone to hold. You’re not sick. We don’t choose who we fall in love with. And sometimes we do things that we regret later. We hurt people we love. Did you hurt Elizabeth or Harper?’

  ‘I w-w-wasn’t there.’

  ‘You told me you were watching.’

  He frowns and moistens his lips with the tip of his tongue. Hair is plastered to his forehead and he looks feverish and pale.

  ‘I can help you, Tommy, but I need the truth. You told me that you saw someone else at the farmhouse that night. You said he was lighting candles.’

  Tommy sniffles and wipes his nose on his sleeve.

  Cray opens a manila folder and shows Tommy a photograph of Dominic Crowe.

  ‘Do you know who that is?’ she asks.

  ‘Harper’s dad.’

  The next photograph is of Jeremy Egan.

  Tommy nods.

  ‘Have you ever seen him at the house?’ asks Cray.

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘In Elizabeth’s bedroom?’

  He nods.

  ‘What about that Saturday night?’

  ‘I d-d-didn’t see him. The man was behind the c-c-curtains.’

  ‘What about this person?’ Cray shows him a photograph of Blake Lehmann.

  ‘That’s Harper’s boyfriend.’

  ‘Was he at the house that night?’

  Tommy frowns in concentration. ‘I heard his m-m-motorbike.’

  ‘How do you know it was him?’

  ‘Dunno.’

  I decide to take him back to earlier in the day, asking him to remember what he was doing. He talks about fixing a fence, changing the oil on the tractor, cleaning the milking machines. He grows more confident with his answers because I’m not accusing him of anything. His stutter disappears.

  ‘You told me that you saw Mrs Crowe come home. It had just got dark. There was someone lighting candles behind the curtains.’

  Tommy hunches his shoulders, not looking at me.

  ‘Did you hear his voice?’

  ‘He were singing.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘No, not singing … chanting.’

  ‘Did you hear the words?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you see Mrs Crowe?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you hear her voice?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What happened then?’

  ‘I went home.’

  I nod to Cray, who reaches beneath the table and produces a plastic bag. ‘We found this under your mattress, Tommy. Do you wear women’s underwear?’

  ‘N-n-n-nah.’

  ‘Who do they belong to?’

  Tommy shakes his head.

  ‘Are they Harper’s?’

  ‘N-n-no!’

  ‘Do they belong to Mrs Crowe?’

  Tommy stares at his hands, looking miserable.

  Cray leans over the table. ‘We’re going to find out, Tommy. We’ll do DNA tests and find out exactly who they belong to. You know about DNA, don’t you? It can tell if you’ve been wanking into these.’

  Tommy looks horrified. Disgusted. ‘I w-w-wouldn’t.’

  ‘Who owns the underwear?’

  ‘M-m-my m-m-a.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Ma.’

  ‘Your mother is dead.’

  ‘I kept ’em.’

  ‘Why?’

  Tommy squirms in his chair.

  Cray demands an answer. ‘Why do you have your mother’s underwear?’

  ‘Cos I miss her,’ cries Tommy. ‘It’s all I have left that smells of her.’

  Cray starts to speak and stops herself. Instead she picks up a blue folder and slides a sheet into view, running her finger down several paragraphs and then tapping it thoughtfully with her index finger. She’s overreached and has to rethink.

  Tommy’s chest heaves and a bubble of spit forms on his lips, bursting with a tiny plop. He wipes his eyes with the back of his hand.

  ‘Tell us about the blood,’ says Cray.

  He blinks at her.

  ‘There must have been a lot of it … on your hands … your clothes. Do you see it when you close your eyes?’

  Tommy’s mouth gapes open like a thick-lipped fish, but no sound emerges. He turns slowly, searching my eyes for sympathy. Then he launches himself from the chair, aiming for the door. Covering the distance in four strides, he beats his right fist against the metal.

  ‘You seem to think you can leave,’ says Cray. ‘You’re here for another forty hours, Tommy. That’s nearly two days. Two nights. Then I can apply for more time.’

  ‘I want to go home.’

  ‘Tell us about the blood.’

  ‘Don’t shout at me.’

  ‘I’m not shouting.’

  ‘Yes, you are.’

  Tommy squeezes his eyes shut and seems to wish the walls would melt away. He returns to his chair and slumps down, cradling his left arm in his lap.

  ‘How did you get blood on your shirt?’ I ask, more gently than the DCS.

  ‘The fence.’

  ‘What fence?’

  ‘Barbed wire c-c-cut me. Tried to clean it up. Nan was angry.’

  Cray glances at me, again derailed.

  ‘Show me your arm,’ I ask Tommy. ‘The one you’re holding.’

  ‘Don’t touch it.’

  ‘I won’t touch it.’

  Gingerly, he pulls up his left sleeve, edging it higher, revealing a bandage wrapped around his forearm. Blood is leaking through the soiled fabric, yellowed by pus at the edges.

  That’s why he looks so feverish. He’s burning up. Cray has opened the interview room door and yells for a doctor. I hear other voices from further away, getting nearer.

  ‘I demand to see my client,’ says a grey-suited man with a squeaky voice. ‘My client is represented,’ he bleats, his pale blue eyes divided by bifocal lenses.

  Cray looks ready to rip his head off. ‘And who might you be?’

  ‘My name is Thomas Archer. I’m Mr Garrett’s lawyer.’ He holds up his business card as though it’s a police badge. ‘My client has been interviewed illegally. Anything he has said is inadmissible.’

  ‘He was read his rights,’ says Cray.

  ‘I’m not talking about today. I’m referring to yesterday at Windy Hill Farm.’

  ‘I don’t have to caution people,’ I say. ‘I’m not a police officer.’

  ‘You’re working for them.’

  Tommy’s grandmother, Doreen Garrett, is with him. A tall, spare figure with a ravaged-looking face, her hair is pulled back so severely that
her eyebrows look like French accents painted on her forehead. She points her finger at me. ‘You put words in his mouth.’

  Mr Archer has noticed Tommy’s bandaged forearm. ‘Have you seen a doctor?’ he asks.

  Tommy shakes his head.

  ‘My client has been denied medical attention. I’m taking him to hospital.’

  ‘He’s still under arrest,’ says Cray.

  ‘You have tortured Mr Garrett. I will be recommending that he sue Avon and Somerset Constabulary for cruel and sadistic treatment.’

  ‘That’s not what happened,’ says Cray.

  ‘Explain that to the judge.’

  Tommy lumbers down the corridor with his squeaking shoes, sallow skin and wheezing breaths. At the last possible moment he turns and I’m expecting one of those pleading, kicked-dog looks. Instead he rubs his chin with the ball of his thumb and his lips curl into a smile.

  ‘You’re a bully and bullies never win.’

  A crowd has gathered outside the police station, drawn by rumours of an arrest. Some of them are reporters, but most are stragglers and hangers-on, standing in the early evening light, hoping to catch a glimpse of a killer.

  ‘When did they arrive?’ asks Cray.

  ‘About an hour ago,’ replies Monk. ‘Bannerman broadcast the story.’

  ‘How did he know?’

  ‘No idea, guv.’

  ‘Christ! That’s all I need.’

  Tommy and his grandmother are just exiting the doors. The crowd has something to focus upon.

  ‘That’s him,’ someone yells. ‘They’re letting him go!’

  They surge forward. Doreen Garrett clings to her grandson. The two constables on crowd control duty are outnumbered. Cray tells Bennie to get backup. Meanwhile, the DCS steps in front of the mob, calling for calm. ‘This man has been not been charged. You must let him pass.’

  Someone breaks free from the crowd and hurls himself at Tommy, driving his shoulder into his stomach. Together they fall down three steps and I can hear the air being forced from their lungs. Dominic Crowe has his hands around Tommy’s throat. Monk reaches them first. He drives his fist beneath Crowe’s ribs. He rolls aside, clutching his stomach and fighting for breath. Spilling tears.

  Meanwhile a dozen uniformed officers appear, clearing a path to the solicitor’s Mercedes.

  ‘This man is going to the hospital,’ yells DCS Cray. ‘You will let him pass or I will have all of you arrested.’

  Tommy and Doreen get into the back seat and the doors close. Mr Archer blinks from behind the wheel, his face startled and bloodless, as the Mercedes pulls away from the kerb, ghosting into the traffic.

  Dominic Crowe is still hanging from Monk’s fist. He touches his bloody nose and stares at his fingers as though he’s discovered something remarkable about himself while cameras record his every gesture.

  Last night I dreamt that a mouse crawled into my mouth and I crunched it up between my teeth until the fur and blood and broken bones started to choke me. I retched and retched but nothing came up.

  I didn’t close my eyes after that. I stared at the ceiling and pretended to be dead, picturing them finding me cold and stiff in my bed. I imagined the funeral and what they would say about me. Will they blame me for how I turned out? I am my father’s son. He cannot wash his hands of me, or this, even if his mind has been scoured by dementia and he cannot remember my name.

  If my father was a monster, my mother was complicit in her compliance. How many times could she have avoided violence if she had simply gone to bed and let him sleep it off? No, she cannot escape her share of the responsibility. Even in death she is still an elemental force. What a pair they make, my parents. I have their DNA and cell by cell, gene for gene, chromosome for chromosome, they are still fighting inside me, battling to see who can fuck me up the most.

  I remember my mother’s last day. The phone rang. She laughed. Blushed. ‘Stop that,’ she said, but didn’t sound as though she meant it. She disappeared into the bathroom where I heard the sound of sprays and lip-popping.

  ‘Why do you put that gunk on?’ I asked.

  ‘So I can be a different person,’ she replied.

  Afterwards I watched her dress, her back to me, her buttocks smooth and perfect, her waist firm.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Out.’

  ‘Can I come?’

  ‘Not this time.’

  She crushed my head against her breasts, which felt like soft feather pillows except for the underwire of her bra cutting into my ear.

  ‘Your da will be home soon. You watch TV.’

  I stood at the front window as she drove away in her bright red Fiesta, never to return. In hindsight, it’s easy to think that I had some sort of premonition about what was going to happen, but no child could possibly foresee that a front-seat blow job would rob him of a mother. I had never heard of oral sex. How does the joke go? I thought fellatio was a famous Italian footballer or a character from Hamlet.

  In the days that followed the accident (that’s what people called it – ‘the accident’) friends and neighbours fluttered around our family, leaving casseroles on the doorstep and trays of lasagne in the freezer.

  Aunt Kate took me to the funeral home to view the body before they closed the coffin. They had put so much make-up on my mother’s face she looked like an over-painted fairy at a little girl’s birthday party. I looked at her lipstick-painted mouth and remembered the lip-popping sounds from the bathroom.

  I sat between Patrick and Agatha at the funeral. The coffin was only a few feet away. I remember wanting to open it up – just to make sure that my mother was still inside.

  Aunt Kate gave the eulogy and afterwards we went back to our house. There were more handshakes and powdered hugs and ruffling of my hair. People I barely knew would crouch to talk to me, telling me that I was being very brave, or that I should ‘let it out’, as though I had a cat inside me.

  Agatha and Patrick stayed in the back garden, smoking and talking to our cousins and younger aunts and uncles. Nobody mentioned the accident, but it was there, hovering in the background like an uninvited guest.

  My father played the role of the grieving husband and most people genuinely felt sorry for him. It was only later that the nudges, sly winks and asides began to eat away at his guts. By then people had retrieved their Tupperware and their Crock-Pots, leaving an empty fridge and the loudness of silence. We were left with our father and his anger. He watched TV. He drank. He slept in the armchair, refusing to climb the stairs and sleep in a bed that ‘stinks of her’.

  When we were hungry he would send us to the neighbours for pity meals, or to borrow bread, or plaster our cuts or get our clothes washed. Agatha suffered the worst of it. He wouldn’t let her wear make-up or get her ears pierced and he collected her clothes from charity shops and second-hand dump bins. Although still at school, she took over the cooking and cleaning, trying too hard to please him.

  ‘What’s this?’ he’d ask, his fists clenched on either of the side of the plate.

  ‘Steak and onions.’

  ‘What did you do with the gravy?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘It’s got lumps.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘What did you put in it? Are you trying to poison me?’

  ‘No. I’m not good at making gravy.’

  ‘I wouldn’t feed this slop to a pig. Do you think I’m a pig?’

  ‘No, Daddy.’

  Oinking, he forced her back to the kitchen, demanding that she make him something else.

  I don’t blame Agatha for running away. My father took her name off the answering machine and didn’t mention her again. She wasn’t hated like my mother … simply forgotten. I have seen Agatha twice since then, the last time when Aunt Kate died. Occasionally, she sends me a cheque to help look after Dad – ‘spending money that he never spent on us’, she says.

  When Patrick left home I was the last one standing, so to speak, alone
in the house with my father. It didn’t help that I looked so much like my mother – the same eyes and nose and mouth. (The mouth! Is that why he wouldn’t look at me?)

  Over time I came to enjoy that perverse fact – the idea that my mother tormented him through me, asleep and awake, drunk or sober, but there was no balancing of the scales. She died. He lived. We lost.

  17

  Sunday morning in Wellow and we feast on open bagels with grilled ham, tomato and Swiss cheese, requested and highly praised. Nobody makes them the way I do. The girls tell me this and I believe them.

  ‘Why do fathers think that making a simple breakfast is worthy of a Michelin star, whereas a mother does it every day without seeking compliments?’ asks Julianne as she scrubs the melted cheese off the grill.

  ‘That’s one of life’s great mysteries.’

  She throws the scouring pad at me. I duck just in time.

  Afterwards she suggests a walk. Emma wants to fly her kite. I don’t think there’s enough wind, but we’ll take it anyway. Dressed in light clothing, we climb Mill Hill Lane and walk past the church and down the main road to the old viaduct. Turning left up a tarmac footpath, we cross a stile where the track turns to grass and drops downhill through an avenue of field maples. Flax and corn poppies and ox-eye daisies are poking through the grasses and flying insects buzz in the hedges.

  There is a natural spring called St Julian’s Well where they draw the water for christenings at the church. According to local legend, this is where Hungerford family ghosts appear, foretelling calamity for the Lords of the Manor.

  We walk in silence for a while. Julianne buries her hands deep in the khaki pockets of her shorts. There are other ramblers on the path. Some of the men pause to glance at Julianne, looking with admiration or envy.

  ‘I read a story the other day,’ she says, balancing one foot on a fence to retie her shoe. ‘It was about a woman who tried to talk a suicidal boy down from a rooftop. He jumped and she reached out and grabbed him by the belt, just in time. They were dangling off the side of the building until bystanders pulled them up. Afterwards, a reporter asked her whether she feared for her life and she said, “We’re all going to die. Why be frightened of it?”’

  ‘I wonder if she was dying,’ I reply.

  ‘What do you mean?’